Fragmental Roadmap to Final Release

Now that we’ve launched Fragmental on Early Access, the real hard work begins. Getting the game out of Early Access and into Final Release.

It’s fair to say that Steam Early Access has been somewhat tainted by some games that have never actually been completed and gone to Final Release. This leaves players who have been trusting enough to take the gamble and spend their money on these games, feeling understandably cheated.

The Roadmap

In order for us to say that Fragmental is no longer an Early Access game, we need to add all of the rest of our planned features and content to have a final, fully functional and feature complete game. While the Early Access release of Fragmental shows the core game at a polished level, we still have a lot of content and important new additions that we need to add, and it’s going to be a lot of work.

Regardless of how much work it’s going to take, we have no intention of staying in Early Access for a lengthy period of time. We have a Roadmap that we’re working to that should see the game complete before the end of Q2 2016, and unless we’re hit by an avalanche of community feedback issues, we think we can make that happen.

Sharing is Caring

As you can likely tell from our previous blog posts, we’re big fans of letting the public know what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and when we’re doing it. So with all of that in mind, we’re going to share our Roadmap with everyone, so they can see what we’re currently working on, and what we have coming in the future, and hopefully from all of that we can get some feedback.

The Roadmap is intentionally high level. It lists only features, content or areas of polish that the will either be clearly apparent to the player, or something they can directly experience in the game. It doesn’t go down to the much larger set of low level tasks, that each individual on the team will need to complete in order for those individual features and content to make it into the final game. That’s where our project schedule comes in – and we’re not sharing that, because nobody should ever get to see behind the curtain – just ask the Wizard of Oz, he was never the same after that.

We decided to split the Roadmap into 8 future Updates, and our goal is to release a new Update every 2 or 3 weeks. We’ve tried to provide some form of theme to each Update, so that players get groups of features or content that compliment each other, and provide a kind of rhythm to the overall Roadmap. The actual deliverables for each Update might change from time to time based on community feedback or internal playtests, but we’ll try to stick to our original plan if it makes sense.

Drum Roll…

We’ve also just added a Roadmap Discussion to our Steam Page for everyone to add any Roadmap based comments they have, and we’ll do our best to keep on top of them all and answer any questions or respond to any suggestions as quickly as we can. If anything happens that means we need to alter the Roadmap we’ll make that clear on the Roadmap Discussion.

If you’re already a Fragmental fan and you would like to help us in any way, you can spread the word about the game and link to our Steam page. Even if you only have a few followers, every little bit of support helps us enormously. If any of you are already spreading the word, it’s hugely appreciated, and please keep it going.